This January I debuted my first true juggling act, Lace. Like most acts that I truly care about—the ones that I might, might, dare to call art—it took me about a year to write, and rehearse, and sort of feel ready enough to put in front of people. I would say I’ve done maybe a fistful of such acts in over a decade of performing.
In this decade or so of performing, I’ve also developed a certain standard of execution for myself, which is to say that there can be no surprises. I do the thing exactly the way I’ve rehearsed, and it is exactly the same every time.
In 2021 though, I started hoop juggling, and things changed. A fabric might have somewhere around five or so ‘tricks’. Barring things like extreme humidity, it’s easy to make those tricks bulletproof as long as you’re warm and well-practiced. When you juggle though, every toss is a trick, and it introduces a lot of room for failure. I did my first hoop act, which was mostly manipulation, in 2022, and I was able to hew pretty close to my expectations through nearly unhinged levels of practice.
A few months after that first act, I took the plunge and decided to learn hoop rolling, something I’ve wanted to do since seeing it in Cirque de Demain in 2015. Probably no piece of circus has blown my mind to that level before or since. You see, there is our world, and then there’s magic, and straddling the line between those two things and just as esoteric as the latter is hoop rolling.
Hoop rollers are not easy to come by, for reasons I have since learned, but nevertheless I managed to find a coach on instagram, and we got started. When I got my first qualify, I was ecstatic. I was doing my dreams! Soon I too would be a mesmeric wizard with beautiful movement quality. (Hoop rolling, and juggling both, have actually significantly improved my land-based movement quality, so there you go.)
Then it got cold. Hoop rolling, unlike toss jugging, apparently required a specific set of circumstances and possible blood sacrifices. The temperature affects how the hoops roll. So does humidity, and surface, and dust, and probably the cycle of the moon.
By the time I learned this information, or rather, had advanced enough that these things actually mattered to what I was doing, it was too late. I was all the way in.
I decided to put rolling in Lace. After all, I had learned it to perform it, and it was thematically perfect for my act. All summer I practiced on the sweltering, dirty racquetball court at my local YMCA. Then winter came and I realized that there is no sort of climate control on the racquetball court. I moved to practicing at the studio, dividing my act into three parts, since it requires both high ceilings and a non-squishy floor.
I practiced and practiced and practiced. I sweated anxiety dreams. I got a prescription for beta blockers. In December I was still having runs where it felt like everything was falling apart. Every time I thought about performing this act at TurboFest, in front of hundreds of other jugglers, I wanted to vomit.
I made it to Quebec in one piece. I got my five minutes of tech time, which is when I found out that the stage was not only quite shallow but looked like this.
There was a spot on the stage with a hole the size of my heel, covered over with Marley. Alone, backstage in the dark, my anxiety spiked. It was all I could do to keep breathing.
In the darkness, I listened to the sound of the four performers before me, unable to see anything happening. They called my name. I went out, trembling. I made it through. It was not a great run, but I was elated. I had survived the most terrifying performance of my life and come out the other side stronger.
After returning home in a blizzard I let the act sit for a week and then I buckled down, redoubling my rolling efforts so that my sequences would be bullet proof. I practiced pulling my rolls into a tighter spiral so that I would be able to handle a smaller stage. I drilled my five hoop skills so that I could run those sequences for double the length.
I had a pretty great run through in February for the Cirque Us benefit show despite a dusty floor and a lackluster rolling week. I managed eight rolls of five hoops. I kept training hard for NECCA’s Circus Spectacular, feeling like my juggling was airtight and my rolling was on its way. I was about to perform in front of more people than I ever had before in my life and instead of that queasy feeling I was excited, except for one, niggling question—what was the stage like? Did it have Marley? Probably not? Was it slippery? Only one way to find out.
When I performed in February I had, gasp, actually enjoyed the act of performing. I’d felt confident and sure. I could feel the audience breathing with me. Somehow, instead of running anxious circles in my mind, somewhere in the two months between TurboFest and NECCA, I was starting to learn to let go, to re-adjust my expectations for myself and the art form I’ve chosen to love. Because, it turns out, I cannot control the weather, or the level of dust on a stage.
The stage for the Circus Spectacular was not, in fact spectacular. It was, in fact terrifically bad. It was not very large, and it was cold and slippery and old and uneven, and also there was an aerial rig that had cables running across the floor between each of the four legs. It also, as I found out during the stage time I had booked on Sunday morning to make changes to account for the aforementioned shortcomings, was slanted. Yes, after a certain point the stage sloped downwards towards the audience, like the drop off in a swimming pool.
I laughed and laughed. After all, I am not quite yet a wizard, and even wizards only have so much sway over the laws of physics. I could freak out, or I could accept the imperfections and make do. I made my adjustments. I took out a trick or two, and I crushed the second show doing a dropless run of a six-minute juggling act.
The irony that it took hoop rolling, that most particular and specific of all types of juggling to help me learn to let go isn’t lost on me. Maybe, one day I’ll get to perform this act on a perfect stage. Regardless, I’m thankful for the toil and the bitter work. It’s made me a better, more confident performer. It’s taught me to let go a little bit and just enjoy the ride and given me the grace to accept the stages I cannot change.
So here, for you, and you alone, my beloved Patrons, is the entirety of my Sunday run from NECCA’s Circus Spectacular complete with brand new music. Thank you so much for being here, I appreciate each and every one of you more than you can know.
XOXO
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